KATIE BYFORD – NORTHEAST

 

 

Carefully, 

 

with no sense

of spatial awareness in her glass tube,

she folded her promises

like spongy eggshells,

feeling the tender sparks of fish

spines cracking beneath her dewy thumbs. She met your eyes.

 

You smiled,

handed her a cigarette,

and much to the dismay of her grandmothers

[one dead, one far away]

she parted her lips, and for a moment

became a spider in its suspended grace,

letting her legs

tumble slowly,

softly, over her prey, all wrapped up

in white paper and damp from her tongue.

 

But beneath her pane of white, beneath the folds

draped across her brow,

down her back,

over the lilting architecture of her body,

 

fire grows and recedes like thick shadows, clinging

to the insides

of the skin around her fingers,

consuming her organs, her brain stem, gnawing

at the wrinkled edges of her soul

which lies unfurled

and golden around her chest – her lungs, her heart,

the brittle crumbling throat

blooming and gleaming like a

great chimney

from a distance. She is

 

growing backwards into herself, falling away

from herself, carefully

losting herself.

 

In a swift turn of evolutionary preservation,

her soul evaporates. She keeps droplets of it

on her hands – it cracks them open and they begin

to breathe.